Heart of Man eBook

He was Count Matteo, a nobleman of the days when the
Messenians revolted against the chancellor of Queen
Margaret. He was placed over this castle; and
when a certain Count Riccardo was discovered in a conspiracy
to murder the chancellor, and was taken captive, he
was given into Matteo’s charge, and imprisoned
here. The Messenians came and surprised the lower
city of Taormina, but they could not gain Mola nor
persuade Matteo to yield Riccardo up to them.
So they thought to overcome his fidelity cruelly.
They took his wife and children, who were at Messina,
threw them into a dungeon, and condemned them to death.
Then they sent Matteo’s brother-in-law to treat
with him. But when the count knew the reason
of the visit he said: “It seems to me that
you little value the zeal of an honest man who, loyal
to his office, does not wish, neither knows how, to
break his sworn faith. My wife and children would
look on me with scornful eyes should I be renegade;
for shame is not the reward that sweetens life, but
burdens it. If the Messenians stain themselves
with innocent blood, I shall weep for the death of
my wife and sons, but the heart of an honest citizen
will have no remorse.” Then he was silent.
But treachery could do what such threats failed to
accomplish. One Gavaretto was found, who unlocked
the prison, and Riccardo was already escaping when
Matteo, roused at a slight noise, came, sword in hand,
and would have slain him; but the traitor behind, “to
save his wages,” struck Matteo in the body,
and the faithful count fell dead in his blood.
I thought of this story, standing there, and nothing
else in the castle’s filled with bloom; then
the infinite beauty, slowly fading, withdrew the scene,
and sweetly it parted from my eyes.

VIII

Yet once more I step out upon the terrace into the
night. I hear the long roar of the breakers;
I see the flickering fishers’ lights, and Etna
pale under the stars. The place is full of ghosts.
In the darkness I seem to hear vaguely arising, half
sense, half thought, the murmur of many tongues that
have perished here, Sicanian and Siculian and the lost
Oscan, Greek and Latin and the hoarse jargon of barbaric
slaves, Byzantine and Arabic confused with strange
African dialects, Norman and Sicilian, French and
Spanish, mingling, blending, changing, the sharp battle-cry
of a thousand assaults rising from the low ravines,
the death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within these
walls, ringing on the hard rock and falling to silence
only to rise more full with fiercer pain—­century
after century of the battle-wrath and the battle-woe.
My fancy shapes the air till I see over the darkly
lifted, castle-rock the triple crossing swords of
Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman in the age-long duel,
and as these fade, the springing brands of Byzantine,
Arab, and Norman, and yet again the heavy blades of
France, Spain, and Sicily; and ever, like rain or
snow, falls the bloody dew on this lone hill-wide.